English Pre-Romantics

English 317
Autumn 2000

A favorite way to look at literary history is to contrast the
stuffy "neoclassical" eighteenth century with the exciting
"Romantic" period that followed it. English 317 will reconsider
this simple opposition by tracing the prehistory of the English
Romantic movement through a great age of literary
experimentation. Works will include Gray's "Elegy," Godwin's
Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
and Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Two
mid-length papers, four OED exercises, and a short final exam.